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Raw Vs. Cooked: A Timeless Debate

Many people are making choices to transition away from our industrialized, over-processed food system. Popular diets are proof of that. Just look at the paleo diet, inspired by the Paleolithic era, which advocates for eating as our ancestors did, mostly whole foods and refusing modern day over-processed offerings including sugary treats, grains, and dairy products. The raw foodism trend takes this a step further and includes a diet of mostly raw, unprocessed local and organic foods as close to their natural state as possible, including raw meat. Many raw food advocates believe that heat from cooking removes natural enzymes, vitamins, and beneficial bacteria found in organic foods that improve the health of an individual's microbiome. Just recently, the World Health Organization has weighed in on some risks associated with cooking and processing meat. However, cooked food advocates argue heat and cooking are essential in order to kill dangerous pathogens, release nutrients, and deconstruct the cellular walls of many foods in order to aid digestion. The USDA has published an internal temperature chart for cooking protein (scroll down) from years of food safety studies. The story is as vast as it is old and carries implications further than your own body.

In his book Cooked, Michael Pollan points out: “Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. … But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.”

How much raw vs. cooked food is likely a question of balance. Many nutritionists do not advocate for an all raw diet citing that a modest serving of cooked starch and/or meat provide the energy necessary to sustain us. And truth be told these cooked foods are what made it possible for us, as modern day men, to exist today.

In this Food List, we address both sides of the argument, and look into the history of cooking and how it played a key role in defining our society. While the debate continues, even the raw food folks have to admit we're all undoubtedly grateful for the gift of fire.

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This week's terms

Nutrients are the essence of life. They’re essential in our function, growth, and survival. We consume our nutrients; carbohydrates, proteins, and fats are macronutrients that fuel the body, while vitamins and minerals are micronutrients that support our metabolism. Imbalances in our consumption of macro- and micro-nutrients manifest into diseases. Nutrients and their calories are in constant exchange through dynamic food webs.

Raw foodism is a diet that includes at least 50% raw, unprocessed whole foods. Some raw foodists only eat a raw plant-based diet, while others choose to include in their diet raw and cooked meat and dairy products.

A process that heats liquids and foods at extremely high temperatures to kill viruses and harmful organisms. Louis Pasteur invented this process in the 1860’s in an effort to subside the spoilage of goods. While pasteurization succeeds in extending the shelf life of different food items, opponents often criticize how the process “kills” the beneficial enzymes and vitamin profiles of foods subjected to the process.

"Fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms. Culinary traditions everywhere make use of fermentation and guide the process so as to avoid food spoilage and instead produce foods and beverages that are enhanced in terms of preservation, NUTRITION and digestibility, flavor, and/or alcohol. Biologists define fermentation differently, as anaerobic metabolism, and most fermented foods and beverages meet this criteria, however some do require oxygen (vinegar, kombucha, tempeh, certain cheeses) and yet these are still widely recognized as fermented. Typically the word fermentation is reserved for microbial processes that are desirable. Undesirable transformations are described as spoilage or rotting rather than fermentation." - Sandor Katz

"Mindful eating is the practice of cultivating an open-minded awareness of how the food we choose to eat affects one’s body, feelings, mind, and all that is around us. The practice enhances our understanding of what to eat, how to eat, how much to eat, and why we eat what we eat. When eating mindfully, we are fully present and savor every bite--engaging all our senses to truly appreciate the food. Beyond just taste, we notice the appearance, sounds, smells, and textures of our food, as well as our mind’s response to these observations. When we eat with this understanding and insight, gratitude and compassion will arise within us. Thus mindful eating is essential to ensure food sustainability for future generations, as we are motivated to choose foods that are not only good for our health, but also good for our planet." - Dr. Lilian Cheung

Insights: The Raw and The Cooked

Cooking began almost two million years ago with the appearance of Homo erectus, according to the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. Other anthropologists have questioned this. However the matter is resolved, it is clear that humans have been cooking for a very long time. Before the first empire, indeed long before farming, they had passed a point of no return, where they could no longer thrive on raw foods. They had become the animals that cooked.

Cooking softened food so that humans no longer had to spend five hours a day chewing, as their chimpanzee relatives did. It made it more digestible, increasing the energy humans could extract from a given amount of food and diverting more of their energy to the brain.

Brains grew and guts shrank. Cooking created mouth-watering new tastes and pleasing new textures, replacing the slightly metallic taste of raw meat with the succulence of a juicy charred steak, for example, and fibrous, tasteless tubers with fragrant, floury mouthfuls.

As human became more intelligent and mastered more methods of cooking, other changes followed. It became possible to detoxify many poisonous plants and soften others that have been too hard to chew, so that humans could digest an increased number of plant species. This allowed more people to live off the resources of a given area as well as making it easier to settle new areas. Ways of treating flesh and plants so that they did not rot permitted the storage of food for the lean times of hard witners or dry seasons.

With cooking, plants and animals became raw materials for food, not food itself. Give that we commonly use the word "food" to describe what farms grow, and given that we eat nuts, fruit, some vegetables, and even fish and steak tartare without cooking, the statement that plants and animals are not food may seem counterintuitive.

But the fact is that most of us get only a small fraction of our calories from raw foods. Even so, that fraction is probably higher than that of our ancestors, since we are the beneficiaries of millennia of breeding that have breated larger, sweeter frit and more tender vegetables and meat.

Furthermore, even what we have called raw has usually be subjected to many kitchen processes. Few of us sink our teeth into raw steak until it has been finely chopped or sliced. Raw foodists allow slicing, grinding, chopping, soaking, sprouting, freezing, and heating to 104-120 degrees Fahrenheit. In spite of modern high-quality plant foods and careful preparation, it is almost impossible to thrive on such a diet, according to evidence gathered by Richard Wrangham.

In antiquity, people happily accepted that humans ate cooked food. Indeed they saw it as what distinguished them from animals.

Perhaps it is because today we place so much emphasis on "fresh" and "natural" foods -- which Susanne Freidberg has shown are made possible only by changing animal life cycles, modern transport, refrigeration, and ingenious packaging -- that we underestimate how much we depend on cooking. In any case, there is no escaping the fact that with cooking, food became an artifact, like clothes and dwelling, not natural but made by humans. A sheaf of wheat is no more food than a ball of cotton is a garment.

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Soy Patagón

Chef Francis Mallman shares how cooking traditions of our past have inspired him in this excerpt from his new cookbook "Mallman on Fire", which is worthy of your coffee table

By Francis Mallman

I have always wanted to go beyond the frontier, and whenever I do get there, I can hear silence. By that I mean I am very conscious of the Indians who once lived here. Mapuches, Tehuelches, Onas—there are still a few there in the most hidden parts of Patagonia, but I hear their spirit everywhere.

The Indians are the ones who first brought fire to this land. In my native region, I learned from the Mapuches, who still cook by burying their feasts, surrounded by hot rocks, a rustic style of communal cooking called curanto. They cooked whole llamas this way and Patagonian ostriches. The Incas, in the hot arid lands that border the Atacama Desert (where astronomers say the air is the clearest of any place on earth), built double-decker fires, separated by flat stones. That technique became the basis for my infiernillo. From the Charrúas Indians of the semitropical area we call the Littoral, I learned to cook on wooden stakes at the side of a campfire.

When the Indians left, pushed out by the Europeans, the gauchos, our cowboys, with their blousy pants and fearsome daggers that left knife scars as a testament of manhood, perfected the parrilla: cooking on grates over live coals. I have spent many nights camping in the wild with my makeshift parrilla. Finally, the bricklayers and carpenters and dockworkers of Buenos Aires taught me the simplest method of all: cooking on a chapa. For them, it was often simply a piece of sheet metal thrown over a fire. The makeshift griddle heated up quickly, so they could cook their sausages and churrasco steaks during the precious minutes of their lunch hour. You will see my version of chapa cooking throughout this book.

It was from the traditions of those Indians and cowboys, carpenters, and stevedores that I learned to take all that I had learned in the temples of European gastronomy as a young chef and simplify and adapt it to cooking with fire. The knowledge I gained in France and Italy about building flavor and working with the best ingredients, about sautéing, and about baking stood me in good stead as I traveled around Argentina experimenting with fire. I have always felt the lure of travel, absorbing influences wherever I go. In time, I began to bring my fires with me.

I went to bustling New York and elegant Paris, to the ineffably beautiful coast of Northern California, to my own farm in the green hills of Uruguay, and to the wild coast of Patagonia in the province of Chubut, where improbably graceful right whales still come to mate each year, and where sea lions congregate on the shore, giving lusty voice to their basso chorus.

And as I traveled, I left myself open to the seasons and the memories and the ingredients that were as surely a part of my baggage as my shirts and blue jeans. When you travel, you cook with what is there, not with what you want to be there. That forces you to think and create. In the course of my travels for this book, I began to experiment more and more. I fell in love with the idea of charring and burning the herbs and greens that I use for salads, marinades, and dressings. In Peter Kaminsky’s backyard in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, I took the idea of the Argentine asado—a beef extravaganza—and created a “parade of pork.” A trip to Northern California introduced me to the caramel-sweet delicata squash. Some herb oils left overnight in the fridge suggested the array of chilled flavored oils that now replace herb butter on many of my grilled dishes. Throughout my travels, I found myself encountering new challenges and new ideas that became new recipes.

A passionate encounter between wanderlust and cooking is what this book is all about. But then, that is what my life has always been about—love, wandering the world, and making food. It is who I am. Maybe someday I will build a restaurant on the Brooklyn waterfront, or on wild Bolinas Bay, or in some Parisian back alley. I still feel as if my travels have only just begun, and wherever I go, I will take the fires of Patagonia with me.

A Mallman Recipe: Leg of Lamb on Strings with Mint-Chile Salmuera

By Chef Francis Mallman

If you like rotisserie cooking but don’t have a rotisserie, here is a low-tech alternative. Hanging a leg of lamb or a whole chicken (or both) from a high tree branch with butcher’s twine over a fire works perfectly. I first tried this at my little restaurant in Trancoso, and I was quite pleased with my new invention. Then Peter Kaminsky told me that he had once seen the same method used by a Masai cook in the Serengeti, where the result is known as “poacher’s lamb.” He said the man was an A-1 chef, so I wasn’t disappointed to learn that the same inspiration had visited another lover of wood-fire cookery.

If you have a high, sturdy tree branch at least 10 feet above your grill that extends far enough from the tree itself to prevent it from being harmed by the fire, climb up a tall ladder and loop double lengths of heavy twine over the branch, with enough left over to truss the lamb and chicken. If you don’t have such a tree, you will need to rig a sturdy iron or steel stand to hang the meat so that it will be about 2 feet above the fire.

Use a double thickness of butcher’s twine or food-grade stainless steel wire to tie up the lamb, configuring loops on the sides and ends for hanging them. Turn occasionally as they cook, and raise or lower them as necessary.

2. Season the lamb with salt and pepper. If desired, brown it on all sides on an oiled grate over the fire before hanging it from the tree or metal stand.

3. Truss the lamb securely with butcher’s twine or wire. Attach the lamb securely to the twine or wire at the end of the shank bone so it is suspended butt end down about 2 feet over the coals. The lamb will be done in about 31⁄2 hours—the internal temperature should read 135°F for medium-rare. Let it rest for 15 minutes before carving. Keep in mind that some parts will be more done than others, so you can serve your guests to their taste.

4. Arrange the lamb on a platter and serve the salmuera on the side.

Variation:
Chicken on Strings

Suspend a trussed, 4-pound, farm-raised chicken and cook over fire. The chicken will be done in about 2 hours—an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh should read 160°F. Let it rest for 5 minutes before carving.

1. Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan. Add the salt and stir until it dissolves. Remove from the heat and let cool until tepid.

2. Meanwhile, wrap the peppercorns in a kitchen towel and pound with mallet until cracked. Place in a mortar, along with the garlic, lemon zest, juice, chopped chile, mint, parsley, and red pepper flakes and pound together to a rough paste. Whisk in the vinegar, half the salted water, and the olive oil. Taste for seasoning and stir in more salted water if desired. Let stand for 30 minutes to blend the flavors before serving.

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What is Cooking?

An exploration of the world of food science and how it can make everyday home cooking easier and more delicious

I know you're eager to jump right in and start cooking, but first answer this question: What is cooking?

If you're my wife, your answer will be, "It's that thing you do when that crazy look comes into your eyes." A great chef might tell you that cooking is life. My mom would probably say that it's a chore, while my wife's aunt would tell you that cooking is culture, family, tradition, and love. And, yes, cooking is all of those things, but here's a more technical way to think about it: Cooking is about transferring energy. It's about applying heat to change the structure of molecules. It's about encouraging chemical reactions to alter flavors and textures. It's about making delicious things happen with science. And before we can even begin to understand what happens when we grill a hamburger, or even what equipment we might want to stock our kitchen with, we have to get one very important concept into our heads first, as it'll affect everything we do in the kitchen, starting with which pots and pans we use. It's this: Heat and temperature are not the same thing.

At its most basic, cooking is the transfer of energy from a heat source to your food. That energy causes physical changes in the shape of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, as well as hastens the rate at which chemical reactions take place. What's interesting is that most of the time, these physical and chemical changes are permanent. Once a protein's shape has been changed by adding energy to it, you can't change it back by subsequently removing that energy. In other words, you can't uncook a steak.

The distinction between heat and temperature can be one of the most confusing things in the kitchen, but grasping the concept is essential to helping you become a more rational cook. Through experience, we know that temperature is an odd measure. I mean, pretty much all of us have walked around comfortably in shorts in 60° weather but have felt the ridiculous chill of jumping into a 60° lake, right? Why does one but not the other make us cold, even though the temperature is the same? Let me try to explain.

Heat is energy. Third-grade physics tells us that everything from the air around us to the metal on the sides of an oven is composed of molecules: teeny-tiny things that are rapidly vibrating or, in the case of liquids and gases, rapidly bouncing around in a random manner. The more energy is added to a particular system of molecules, the more rapidly they vibrate or bounce, and the more quickly they transfer this movement to anything they are touching—whether it's the vibrating molecules in a metal pan transferring energy to a juicy rib-eye steak sizzling away or the bouncing molecules of air inside an oven transferring energy to the crusty loaf of bread that's baking.

Heat can be transferred from one system to another, usually from the more energetic (hotter) system to the less energetic (cooler). So when you place a steak in a hot pan to cook it, what you are really doing is transferring energy from the pan burner system to the steak system. Some of this added energy goes to raising the temperature of the steak, but much of it gets used for other reactions: It takes energy to make moisture evaporate, the chemical reactions that take place that cause browning require energy, and so on.

Temperature is a system of measurement that allows us to quantify how much energy is in a specific system. The temperature of the system is dependent not only on the total amount of energy in that body, but also on a couple of other characteristics: density and specific heat capacity.

Density is a measure of how many molecules of stuff there are in a given amount of space. The denser a medium, the more energy it will contain at a given temperature. As a rule, metals are denser than liquids,* which in turn are denser than air. So metals at, say, 60°F will contain more energy than liquids at 60°F, which will contain more energy than air at 60°F.

*All right, Mr. Smarty-Pants. Yes, at high enough temperatures, metals will melt into very dense liquids, and yes, Mr. Even Smartier-Pants, mercury is a very dense metal that is liquid even at room temperature. Got that out of your system? OK, let's move on.

Specific heat capacity is the amount of energy it takes to raise a given amount of a material to a certain temperature. For instance, it takes exactly one calorie of energy (yes, calories are energy!) to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Because the specific heat capacity of water is higher than that of, say, iron, and lower than that of air, the same amount of energy will raise the temperature of a gram of iron by almost 10 times as much and a gram of air by only half as much. The higher the specific heat capacity of a given material, the more energy it takes to raise the temperature of that material by the same number of degrees.

Conversely, this means that given the same mass and temperature, water will contain about 10 times as much energy as iron and about half as much as air. Not only that, but remember that air is far less dense than water, which means that the amount of heat energy contained in a given volume of air at a given temperature will be only a small fraction of the amount of energy contained in the same volume of water at the same temperature. That's the reason why you'll get a bad burn by sticking your hand into a pot of 212°F boiling water, but you can stick your arm into a 212°F oven without a second thought (see "Experiment: Temperature Versus Energy in Action," below).

Confused? Let's try an analogy.

Imagine the object being heated is a chicken coop housing a dozen potentially unruly chickens. The temperature of this system can be gauged by watching how fast each individual chicken is running. On a normal day, the chickens might be casually walking around, pecking, scratching, pooping, and generally doing whatever chickens do. Now let's add a bit of energy to the equation by mixing a couple cans of Red Bull in with their feed. Properly pepped up, the chickens begin to run around twice as fast. Since each individual chicken is running around at a faster pace, the temperature of the system has gone up, as has the total amount of energy in it.

Now let's say we have another coop of the same size but with double the number of chickens, thereby giving it double the density. Since there are twice as many chickens, it will take double the amount of Red Bull to get them all running at an accelerated pace. However, even though the final temperature will be the same (each individual chicken is running at the same final rate as the first ones), the total amount of energy within the second coop is double that of the first. So, energy and temperature are not the same thing.

Now what if we set up a third coop, this time with a dozen turkeys instead of chickens? Turkeys are much larger than chickens, and it would take twice as much Red Bull to get one to run around at the same speed as a chicken. So the specific heat capacity of the turkey coop is twice as great as the specific heat capacity of the first chicken coop. What this means is that given a dozen chickens running around at a certain speed and a dozen turkeys running around at the same speed, the turkeys will have twice as much energy in them as the chickens.

To sum up:

At a given temperature, denser materials generally contain more energy, and so heavier pans will cook food faster. (Conversely, it takes more energy to raise denser materials to a certain temperature.)

At a given temperature, materials with a higher specific heat capacity will contain more energy. (Conversely, the higher the specific heat capacity of a material, the more energy it takes to bring it to a certain temperature.)

In this book, most recipes call for cooking foods to specific temperatures. That's because for most food, the temperature it's raised to is the primary factor determining its final structure and texture. Some key temperatures that show up again and again include:

32°F (0°C): The freezing point of water (or the melting point of ice).

130°F (52°C): Medium-rare steak. Also the temperature at which most bacteria begin to die, though it can take upward of 2 hours to safely sterilize food at this temperature.

150°F (64°C): Medium-well steak. Egg yolks begin to harden, egg whites are opaque but still jelly-like. Fish proteins will tighten to the point that white albumin will be forced out, giving fish like salmon an unappealing layer of congealed proteins. After about 3 minutes at this temperature, bacteria experience a 7 log reduction—which means that only 1 bacterium will remain for every million that were initially there.

160° to 180°F (71° to 82°C): Well-done steak. Egg proteins fully coagulate (this is the temperature to which most custard or egg-based batters are cooked to set them fully). Bacteria experience a 7 log reduction within 1 second.

212°F (100°C): The boiling point of water (or the condensation point of steam).

300°F (153°C) and above: The temperature at which the Maillard browning reactions—the reactions that produce deep brown, delicious crusts on steaks or loaves of bread—begin to occur at a very rapid pace.The hotter the temperature, the faster these reactions take place. Since these ranges are well above the boiling point of water, the crusts will be crisp and dehydrated.

Check out more about the exploration of cooking and the primary sources of energy and heat transfer at the link below.

Raw Milk Goat Cheese

Haystack Dairy has been making goat cheese for 22 years. Cheese made from unpasteurized milk is packed with live enzymes and full of flavor.

Jackie, the cheese maker, starts by transferring milk from the bulk tank to the cheese vat. Then, she stirs and gradually heats the milk for one hour. After checking the milk’s temperature, she adds the cultures and waits for it to reach the proper PH level. That done, she adds rennet mixed with H2O. This coagulates the milk in a matter for minutes. The flocculation time, the time it takes to develop curd, is closely monitored. Once it develops, the curd is cut with a cheese harp. In this final stage all excess moisture is removed, including the whey.

One Farmers Perspective on the Raw Milk Debate

Mike Guebert, a local small scale integrated livestock farmer who sells raw milk from his farm direct to the public, shares his perspective on the safety and benefits of raw unpasteurized milk. According to a recent survey from the Center For Disease Control, there are an estimated 9 million people in the U.S. who consume raw milk. To gain a sense of how polarized an issue raw milk is in this country, the following quotes, and information below paint two very different realities.

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Recommended Cooking Temperatures

The USDA recommends to cook meat and eggs to these specific internal temperatures to ensure they are safe for consumption. The minimum internal temperatures can be viewed in the chart below. The USDA advises to measure the food with a food thermometer before removing it from the heat source.

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Cooked Raw

The best way to eat vegetables is cooked raw

I remember Dr. Thomas Cowan, author of the Fourfold Path to Healing, once saying: the best way to eat vegetables is raw because all their enzymes are intact, but the best way to eat vegetables is also cooked because otherwise their nutrients are bound up in cellulose and aren't very accessible. This leads us to the conclusion that the best way to eat vegetables is cooked raw. So what are cooked raw vegetables? Fermented vegetables!

The fermentation process actually increases enzymes, and also adds lots of probiotics and beneficial bacteria. Meanwhile, like cooking, fermentation breaks down cellulose and releases vitamins and minerals. At Three Stone Hearth we've been making fermented vegetables for almost a decade--mostly a wide variety of sauerkrauts--but recently we've started pickling (lactofermenting) a wider array of vegetables, including purslane (pictured above), jicama, nopales, cauliflower, snow peas, and, of course, cucumbers.

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Elaina Love's Recipe for Raw Marinated Veggie Lasagna

Yield: 8 servings Prep time: 1 hour

Ingredients

Veggies
4 medium yellow or green zucchini, thinly sliced lengthwise on a mandolin
2 large Portobello mushrooms chopped and marinated in Tamari or lemon and salt
1 large head or 4 cups spinach and 2 cups arugula washed, dried and pulsed in a food processor
1 large red bell pepper and 1 large yellow bell pepper, julienned and chopped then dehydrated for 1 or more hours

You can also make your lasagna in a spring form pan. Remove the side of the pan and it looks like a fancy vegetable terrine!

If it’s a sunny day, place it in the sun with a dehydrating screen on top for protection for a couple hours. Otherwise, warm it in the dehydrator on 125 degrees until mealtime.

Place enough zucchini slices on the bottom of a square glass pan (9×9) to cover it.

Layer on 1/3 of the marinara sauce.

Then layer 1/3 of the ricotta. Use your fingers or a pastry bag if necessary to spread evenly.

Squeeze all the liquid out of the mushrooms using your hands or a nut milk bag and layer all of them on the cheese. (You can pulse them in a food processor and make a meaty texture if desired.)

Squeeze the liquid out of the pulsed spinach/arugula using a nut milk bag and layer 1/2 onto the mushrooms.

Then 1/2 the bell peppers.

Start again with the zucchini, sauce, ricotta, mushrooms, spinach and peppers. Keep layering until you run out of ingredients or room in your pan and finish with the cheese, then sauce, making it swirl together so that when you dehydrate it, it looks like baked lasagna.